Preliminary Designs

One of the keys to a good design process – one that begins with “here’s what I’m thinking about” and ends with a finished home design, is the preliminary design phase. Working through various design ideas at a low level of detail and a low level of committment is how we explore several design concepts quickly.

Since there’s no right answer to the questions that design raises, it’s a bad idea to get stuck in a design rut that you can’t get out of. Early design sketches are meant to be quick, conceptual, diagrammatic, and communicative. “What if we did this?” and “What if we did that?” and “Let’s try another direction.”

Here are a bunch of examples from my work over the past few years. Some of these were designs that are close to what ultimately got built, and some are early concepts that were rejected.